The principal goal of this project is to generate a focused account of the developmental experiences relevant to the early stages of schooling available to young children (5 1/2 - 8 1/2 years) in a variety of different sociocultural groups within a large city. The guiding hypotheses are as follows: (a) distinctive patterns of socialization practices can be identified in the home environments of children being raised as members of different sociocultural groups; (b)these distinctive patterns reflect different implicit theories of child development and parental responsibility among the children's primary caregivers; and (c) a major source of variation in the patterns of school performance by children of different sociocultural groups is the variable degree to which the socialization practices and associated parental beliefs of their home environment match the developmental pathway defined by the curriculum of public elementary schools. The study will examine the gradual emergence of literacy competencies among children aged 5 1/2 to 8 1/2 in the distinctive ecocultural niches of four types of neighborhoods within the city of Baltimore: one populated mainly by low-income African-American families, one mainly by low-income Euro-American families, and two populated by a mix of African-American and Euro- American families (one middle-income neighborhood, and one low- income). A combination of qualitative and quantitative measures will be used, collected longitudinally over a three-year period. These measures include documentation of recurrent activities and material resources in the home environment, observations of caregiver-child interaction during activities affording opportunities for literacy learning, and interviews with caregivers to determine their implicit theories and beliefs about development. In addition, children's emergent independent competencies in literacy will be assessed using contextually-sensitive tasks. The resulting data will provide an integrated account of the emergence of literacy in sociocultural context.